Marymere Falls is one of our "too lazy" hikes. It's about 45 minutes round trip, including gawking at the falls. As usual in the winter, the falls were roaring. See the arty pseudo-panorama to the right. Eventually, they'll get cameras for taking pictures of stuff like this, but for now we can be arty.

We've been playing with a program called Panorama 360 which runs on the iPod Touch. While the iPod Touch is ostensibly an iPhone without the phone, it does have a camera and an accelerometer in it. This means that when you take a picture, the device can tell which way you are pointing the camera. If you take a series of pictures while pointing in different directions, it can paste them together to form a panorama. This isn't the first time anyone did this sort of thing. Mike Neimark built a simlar rig back in the late 70s, but it makes for a delightful new way of taking photographs.

These aren't like the panoramas we've taken before. Those were of much higher quality and stitched together using Adobe Photoshop. The iPod Touch has a cell phone camera, and not a very good one. It doesn't work very well in low light situations, such as one finds in a rain forest. The Panorama 360 program builds the picture while one watches it, so one can see the panorama grow and move the camera to capture more of the scene. The sensor in the camera isn't very good, and, let's face it, the human hand is no substitute for a proper tripod.

Despite all the problems, the panoramic photographs produce are atmospheric. They capture the light, colors and sense of the place surprisingly well. The first photographs were fuzzy, peculiar images, so strange that they inspired the Impressionists to rethink how one represents the world on canvas. These images are fuzzy and, perhaps, peculiar, but with digital cameras adding pixels and improving technically day by day, they offer an alternate way of capturing our world.

Taken from the Olympic Discovery Trail at the west end of the dike

The deli display at De Laurenti in Pike's Place Market

More goodies at De Laurenti, quite distorted because Panorama assumes a circular scan, not a linear one

Along the Lake Angeles Trail

Trying to capture the clearing caused by that great windfall some years back

We don't post a lot of Lake Crescent Cottage news here, but we remodeled the downstairs bathroom back in March and have spent the time since then figuring out how to take a proper picture. We tried a few different approaches, with clever camera angles and a wide angle lens, but were never really satisfied. Finally, we decided to try taking a panorama, a series of photographs and using Photoshop to combine them into a single image. We've taken panoramas before, but always in the wide open spaces like the top of Klahane Ridge or out at Obstruction Point so we could capture miles of mountains and glorious scenery in a single image. We don't want to deprecate our cottage bathroom, but we accept that it is of a much smaller scale. So, to make a long story short, or perhaps just to end a long story, here is our Lake Crescent Cottage bathroom panorama. As with our larger scale panoramas, this one looks even better in person.

This has been an unusual autumn, with an early snow and an early thaw. We thought we had said goodbye to the high country a while back, but we've just stumbled down from Klahane Ridge and must report that the high country is still open.

The sky was gray and tinged with pink. The sun doesn't rise all that high this time of year. Still, the views were as spectacular as ever, with the Blue Glacier showing its color in the wintry light.

Here is a panorama of the view from Klahane Ridge, so you can see what we are talking about.

The first time you visited Hurricane Ridge, you probably climbed to Sunrise Point, and you may even have gone some ways on the trail that leads to Klahane Ridge. To be honest, we haven't taken this trail in years. We like to climb the Switchback Trail to Klahane Ridge, and since the Sunrise Point Trail starts right at the lodge, we've been considering it a bit tame.

This week, the high country opened again. The snow had melted from the hills, and the ice had melted from the road. The twisty little road to Hurricane Hill was closed, and Obstruction Point Road was closed for the season, so we decided to climb up to Sunrise Point and then see where the trails took us. The day was spectacular, with the sky blue and the snow on the mountains white. Even a tame trail in the Olympic high country offers a lot of great stuff to look at.

To share the experience, we took a few panorama photos. If you click on the little preview you should get a larger version that you can pan across in your web browser. It isn't the same as the real thing, but it might give you a sense of the view from Hurricane Ridge.

Along the ridge - click on the picture for a bigger version that you can pan horizontally.

A good view of Mount Angeles, and everything else - click on the picture for a bigger version that you can pan horizontally

Obstruction Point Road was open again so we shot out for a last peek at the high country. The road isn't much. It's about 1.5 lanes wide, and, now that the autumn rains are upon us, it is getting a bit rutted and here and there large rocks have settled on the roadway. Still, the road was passable, so we went out and took a short walk, and we took some pictures which we've turned into panoramas.

The view to the east - click on the picture for a bigger version that you can pan horizontally

The view to the south with Mount Olympus - click on the picture for a bigger version that you can pan horizontally

Another view to the south with Mount Olympus - click on the picture for a bigger version that you can pan horizontally

This is a panorama view from up on Hurricane Hill. We were up there on a gray day, and the sun was just leaking through the clouds. The grasses are turning golden, and there are a few ice crystals on the ground. Autumn is coming to the high country. Click on the image for the huge, full resolution 6000 x 1900 panorama.

One day we have to learn how to use the panorama mode on our
digital camera. Either that, or they have to produce an Olympic
National Park special camera with 8 megapixels with an 8 to 1 aspect
ratio. That's Storm King as seen from across the lake, and it is
mysterious and brooding. The higher resolution image you can view by
clicking on the image above is all soft, discrete cosine transform
ready gradients, so it should load real quickly. Thank you, all you
joint photographic experts from the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), not that we have anything
against the joint photographic experts from High Times.

Click on the image above for a very nice, big panorama of the view from Hurricane Hill. Granted, the stitching shows, but the scenery was spectacular. This has been a great year for the winter outdoors.

The poorly assembled panorama below was taken from the Spruce Railroad Trail. The big mountain towards the left is Storm King, and you can see the snowline running across it. This time of the year, winter moves from the north to the south, but it also moves from high above to down below. You can click on this image for a larger version if you like, and you have a fast connection.

We were browsing the web and came across the Washington State Department of Ecology's Shoreline Aerial Photos database, and we couldn't resist putting together a couple of composite images. The one linked to above is of the Dungeness Spit. The image above is just the image chip, click on it for the full 5910 x 448 image. The one linked to below is of Second Beach, the image is 3916 x 710. That California Coastal Records database gets all the attention, but the Washington State Coast has its charms as well.